James Webb Space Telescope gives us the oldest ever look at the universe\u00a0<\/p>\n
On December 25, 2021, space enthusiasts around the world held their breath as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most powerful space observatory ever built, launched from French Guiana. From orbit about a million miles from Earth, JWST has peered into the dawn of the universe (discovering new mysteries therein)<\/a>, glimpsed the skies of distant exoplanets, provided a fresh look at objects in our own solar backyard, and produced mesmerizing views of our cosmos<\/a>. With 100 times the power of the Hubble Telescope, JWST is our sharpest eye on the universe\u2014and it\u2019s just getting started.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thousands of planets discovered orbiting other stars\u00a0<\/p>\n Though the first exoplanets<\/a> were spotted in the 1990s, it wasn\u2019t until the 2009 launch of NASA\u2019s Kepler telescope that the age of exoplanetary discovery<\/a> really got rolling. Over its nearly decade-long run, Kepler discovered over 2,600 exoplanets\u2014an astonishing haul that confirmed, at last, that planets of all kinds are common around stars in our galaxy. \u00a0<\/p>\n Since Kepler retired in 2018, a new generation of planet-hunting telescopes\u2014including JWST and NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS<\/a>)\u2014have continued to shed light on the many tantalizing worlds beyond our solar system. We\u2019ve discovered planets that rain metal, potentially habitable planets, and \u201crogue\u201d planets that roam interstellar space. As of 2025, we\u2019re at 6,000 confirmed exoplanet detections and counting.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n We can now directly attribute weather disasters to climate change<\/p>\n Scientists have known for decades that humanity\u2019s consumption of fossil fuels is causing global temperatures to rise, and therefore amplifying extreme weather events like heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires. But it wasn\u2019t until 2004 that researchers specifically attributed the severity of a natural disaster to climate change the severity\u2014in that case, the deadly 2003 heatwave in Europe.<\/p>\n This study marked the dawn of climate attribution<\/a>, a field that isolates our own human contribution to Earth\u2019s complex climatic and environment shifts. Since then, we\u2019ve learned that climate change can raise the odds of a severe weather event, such as the 2019 European heatwave<\/a>, and can also intensify these natural disasters. For example, human-driven warming was linked to intense rainfall in Hurricane Harvey and the exceptionally dry vegetation that fueled the 2025 Los Angeles fires<\/a>. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Webb Space Telescope gives us the oldest ever look at the universe\u00a0 On December 25, 2021, space…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[7021,1204,14192,6678,11836,61344,12215,67636,7958,164491,198257,874,74,70,198255,198256,16,15,2489,31813],"class_list":{"0":"post-646318","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-black-hole","9":"tag-cancer","10":"tag-crispr","11":"tag-dark-matter","12":"tag-dinosaur","13":"tag-gravitational-waves","14":"tag-human-genome-project","15":"tag-immunotherapy","16":"tag-james-webb-space-telescope","17":"tag-lidar","18":"tag-mummy","19":"tag-nasa","20":"tag-physics","21":"tag-science","22":"tag-top-discoveries","23":"tag-top-science-breakthrough","24":"tag-uk","25":"tag-united-kingdom","26":"tag-vaccine","27":"tag-virus"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115757784989150915","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}